I'm not even thirteen yet and I almost died, I mused inwardly. Outwardly, I couldn't contain my laughter. The giggles wracked me from the belly to the chest, cramping the muscles around my midriff and making my eyes water.
"It's okay," my mother soothed, "we're all right. Everything's fine." Problem is, I didn't know if she was trying to soothe us or herself.
Ryan was uncharacteristically quiet in the back seat. I figured he'd be screaming his considerable guts out, making his usual drama-queen presence felt. Then again, maybe it wasn't drama.
I was turned backward staring out the rear window of the big Olds Cutlass while it sped away, watching the steam drift lazily from the front of the Triumph TR-7 as we left it behind.
In the ditch. Where it crashed.
See, this was one of those times when the event seems funny later, but at the time it was sort of scary. My mother, my brother and I piled into the car that afternoon to go to the grocery store. For most people, going to the grocery store was a pretty uneventful trip. They go, they get their groceries, they leave; no big deal. For us, it was a life-threatening experience on more than one occasion ... never mind the trip to and from school. That could be a thrill ride like no other, too. On this occasion, we were going to the Kroger in nearby Fort Oglethorpe, GA. It was a few miles away. I always called it "Fort Ugly-thorpe." I was a jerk like that at 12 or 13.
To get there, though, the most expedient route was to take State Line Road. Logically enough, State Line Road is the borderline between Georgia and Tennessee. It crossed the north end of Bell Avenue and stretched away east and west, rising and falling in rolling hills. It was a tiny, narrow, two-lane band of blacktop that rose up a small crest just west of Bell Avenue and then dropped again as it divided the town and the states from each other. I had never seen roads so narrow before; and I never saw roads that rose and dropped like that. In my native California, there were LOTS of hills and mountains, of course, but they were larger, and didn't cause the dramatic peaks and troughs the way the tiny hills bumped the older roads of the deep south. I guess Georgia didn't have the land moving equipment available to flatten the roads the way they did in California. Or maybe it cost too much. Or who knew why, but there they were -- roads full of little dips and valleys that would give your stomach a tiny roller coaster thrill if you were going fast enough.
They could also be a bit dangerous, if you were going fast enough.
See, the dips were relatively deep; deep enough so you couldn't see the cars in front of you in certain places. Those dips were sometimes high enough that you didn't see the other side of them until you'd crested the rise, and cars on either side of the hill were invisible to each other.
As a kid, who cared about that stuff? That was the adult's job; they were driving. All we had to do was enjoy the ride.
Knowing how my mother drove -- we got a real feel for it when we transferred from public school, within walking distance of home, to a private Catholic school across town, requiring a ride from either Mom or Dad every morning -- there was no "enjoying" the ride. You learned to keep your eyes peeled and be ready to cry out if something bad was going to happen. I don't know why, we couldn't have done squat about it except yell, but I guess that was our plan. Yell just before you die. Just like in the movies.
So anyway, that afternoon, we were headed for the Kroger. We backed safely out of our driveway -- not as mundane a task as you might think, but that's another story -- then headed north on Bell Avenue to the intersection with State Line Road. So far, so good.
You look both ways before you turn, then you look both ways again. There's no way to necessarily see the oncoming traffic, like I told you. And there was a pretty steep rise not too far west of Bell Ave. So, Mom watched carefully (she wasn't drunk yet), then turned out onto SLR and headed west.
The car was huge -- a '70 Olds Cutlass, baby blue with a white Landau top. Yeah, it was older, but it had a big motor, and would get to speed pretty quickly if you asked it to. It's throaty V8 would growl threateningly and push you forward, sucking passengers back into their seats when you goosed it to get on the highway or something. When we got onto SLR, my mother squashed on the pedal a bit and the car began it's obese, inertia-laden climb up the speedometer.
As we crested one small rise and headed for the big one, passing the grassy fields, lawns and thick-trunked trees separated from the pavement by the deep open drainage ditches on both sides, something moved quickly out of the corner of my eye, just to the right of the car on the north side of the road.
As quick as a blink, a big, fat gray squirrel darted into the middle of the road.
My mother's a weird one, if you haven't gathered already. She hates mice and rats, opossum and things like that, with a passion. Screams bloody murder, jumps on furniture, hides behind my dad -- you know, the whole "femme fatale" thing. But squirrels, chipmunks, hampsters ... they're all okay for some reason.
So, when she saw that fat, lazy-ass, well-fed squirrel skitter himself onto the road, she didn't want to hit it.
"OH! A squirrel!" The words were spilling out of her mouth while she yanked the wheel hard left, tires barking and screeching in protest, pulling the car into the left lane. You know, the one for oncoming traffic.
Now, this is like 1977 or 78. '78, I think. There weren't any seatbelt laws, and we didn't wear 'em then. So, I didn't have one on, and my brother in the backseat didn't have one on either. That's partially why my head went slapping against the window, thunking like an empty gourd, knocking my glasses all cockeyed and crooked on my face. And it's why Ryan, sitting in the center of the back seat to see more clearly out the windshield, went toppling with limbs akimbo like a chimp tumbling around its cage at the zoo. I knew we were going pretty fast, but that little exchange with G-forces let me know how right I was.
I was trying to push my glasses back onto my nose and sit up when I saw a car crest that big rise, just ahead of us.
It was a tiny sports car -- I knew from my mom's youngest sister that it was a Triumph TR-7, one of her favorites -- and he was really cooking when he hit the top of that hill. He was moving along so fast, in fact, that his tires left the road at the top of the hill. I know, because I saw the air beneath them from our viewpoint, along with the underside of the car in flight. He didn't get real high, but high enough that he couldn't steer. Not with no tires on the road.
The driver's face, a young man with dark glasses and hair, went ashen white through his windshield as his mouth dropped open to form an obscenity. I heard a sound, something along the lines of "Oh no!" from my left, and then suddenly, viciously, the car ripped to the right again, once more barking and squealing the rubber on the asphalt as the lumbering hulk of metal and glass yanked back to the right lane, spilling me face-first into the bench seat between my mother's ass and mine.
I couldn't tear my eyes away from the tiny sports car when I sat upright again. The wheels hit and grabbed, and the driver pulled simultaneously on the steering wheel.
To his left, of course. Right into our path again.
There was precious little distance between the two cars as they hurtled toward one another, and the eyebrows of the driver in the TR-7 rose up above the tops of his sunglasses, his mouth wide and gaping, looking like a snapshot of surprise you'd find in a first year psych book. He tugged again, harder, and there may have been a gasp from my mother, but there was no more reaction than that -- straight on she barreled, and suddenly the little black sports car vanished.
I spun in my seat, looking out the rear window to see what had happened. My jaw dropped in shock at the sight.
The TR-7 was perpendicular to the road, his hood on one side of the deep drainage ditch on the north side of the road, his rear wheels spinning uselessly above the other side. The driver's door was open, and steam was rising from the front end of the V-shaped car, which buckled just before the windshield when it smashed against the drainage ditch. It looked like a sad gypsy's accordion, sagging, broken and clicking across the wide ditch. The driver had his arm hanging out of the open door, shaking his head in stunned disbelief with his eyes closed. I don't think he ever saw us, and didn't open his eyes to catch a glimpse as we climbed that rise.
So, my mother accelerated. We hit that rise and went down the other side and rocketed along State Line Road like never before.
She was still cooing to us that we were okay, everything was fine, and please don't tell dad about this, nothing happened, we're all fine, when we finally got to Kroger.
We stayed there for a really, really long time. I don't remember when I stopped laughing.
And I still don't like squirrels.
-JDT-
Monday, March 19, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
The Mouse that Roared
I finally had it cornered. And there is nothing more dangerous than a cornered animal.
That morning wasn’t anything unusual. It was a crisp, overcast autumn day. I don’t even remember what month it was, to tell the truth. I remember the coolness outside, and the way the day started so chilly. My grandmother called the weather “brisk,” and my mother never stopped imitating it. You should hear someone who’s drunk mock another person’s southern drawl; it’s a comedy classic. Anyway, there wasn’t anything unusual about that day to speak of, as best I can recall.
It must have been either Saturday or Sunday. Maybe it was after school. I don’t recall anymore. What I do remember, though, is the cold of the linoleum floor biting right through my socks and chilling my feet. I completely dressed everyday in those years, for a couple of reasons. One, I never knew what the day would hold. Sometimes the order of the day was “exploring” -- that was my lush mother’s term for getting in the car and getting as lost as possible. Other times, the day was spent watching her get progressively more drunk, belligerent and stupid while the Michelob bottles piled up around the house. On those days, I tried to be outside or somewhere else -- ANYwhere else -- as much of the day as I could. But, during the cold months, my mother spent her days shivering in front of an electric coil heating element that ticked and clicked, glowing red hot from it’s tiny alcove in the lower part of the wall. It didn’t heat much, so she’d stand right in front of it with a sweater or light jacket on, her knees and hands clenched together while she chattered her teeth and bitched about the cold.
On that day, I was doing something with my brother in our room. We were playing with our dolls -- sorry, I mean “action figures” -- or something like that. It was too cold to play outside and not cold enough to snow, so we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We holed up in our room and tried not to pay attention to what was going on in the other areas of the house. My old man wasn’t there, and it was just me, Ryan and my mother.
So when she screamed her blood-curdling scream of terror, we both bolted without thought into the living room to see what was wrong.
She wasn’t there. We passed into the main room of the house, which was the kitchen. There was a tiny gas stove that seemed to date to the Civil War against the wall adjacent to the entrance from the living room, and a diminutive refrigerator beside it on the connecting wall that separated the kitchen from the “spare bedroom“. The old farm-style sink, buried in a bank of rotting and leaning cabinets that seemed to beg for a swift merciful death were opposite the spare bedroom. Against these, pinned like a knife was being held to her face, was my wide-eyed and horrified mother.
“What’s going on?” I said, following her terror-frozen stare into the spare bedroom.
“S-something -- h-HUGE -- ran across -- in that room --” she stammered.
“What was it, Mommy?” Ryan yelled. He got excited easily and had a big mouth.
“A - m-m-m-MOUSE!” she spat, and buried her head in her hands as a case of the willies shook her like a dusty blanket.
“A mouse?” I repeated, suddenly trying to become the “man of the house.” With my dad away, of course, it was my job to address these things. Spiders in the corner, mice in the kitchen, burglars threatening to enter -- these things became my responsibility when my father wasn’t at home. At least, it was in my mind.
I marshaled my entire five-foot-one frame and began to march toward the “spare bedroom.” I never knew how the hell it qualified as being “spare” when my stinking, loud-mouthed, slob of a brother and I had to share a room, but I didn’t make the rules. I strutted into the room, which had always been filled with our “leftover” furniture, boxes that never got unpacked, a big Kenmore freezer filled with frozen meat, and miscellaneous crap that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else in the house. We’d definitely down-graded from the house we had in California, and the “spare room” was actually a storage locker, in retrospect.
Somewhere, among all the crumpled newspaper pages, stacks of battered corrugated cardboard, rippled and stained linoleum, and the one ancient, paint-crusted window, a mouse was hiding.
I waltzed in like a young gunslinger going to meet the local hero in a bad western. I had the freezer along one wall to my right, the window in front of me and the “closet” -- a gap between two interior walls that was divided in half to form a storage space for this room and our room just beyond it -- to my left, along with most of the room. I swaggered in, feeling very grown-up and John Wayne-ish, swatting boxes and rattling stacks of debris to shoo the mouse out of hiding.
“Be careful!” my mother called, another bout of the willies shivering the words out of her.
“It’s only a mouse, mom,” I said, rolling my eyes. How much of a problem can this be?
I’d dealt with mice before. Tiny, with little pink limbs and those bouncing, stiff little tails, they usually were found at the wrong end of a hardware store trap of wood and copper. But, I reasoned, they’re so small a good stomp should do the trick. The brownish little vermin were generally no longer than your index finger and could be driven to a heart attack if you sent them up in a tin can on a kite string. I’d done it with some friends when I was a kid. We caught a field mouse out near the Contra Costa Canal back home, just outside the Dutch Pride Dairy on Railroad Avenue. He didn’t fight much, and we tied a tin can to Barry Watters’ kite up near where the string anchored to the plastic, delta-winged kite. We sent the kite up for a bit; it went wonky a couple of times, but nothing ever fell out of the can. When we drew it back in that mouse was dead, blood oozing from his teeny pink nose. So, this would be no big deal.
I heard the critter scratching around some boxes back in the corner of the room, and my mother wailed and recoiled into the kitchen again. My brother kept pushing his round, fat nose into the room and screaming “Was that it?? Where is it?? I wanna see it!” I kept shouting at him to give me some room and not to let it get out. There was a flash of brown as the mouse skittered out of my peripheral vision, and I whizzed around on my Chukka-boot sole to stomp on it.
What I saw wasn’t a tiny mouse with delicate pink limbs and a bouncing little tail.
I hit the brakes when I saw it, and felt like the slick linoleum might as well have been ball bearings and marbles. I couldn’t seem to stop as I hurtled headlong into the beast’s open, frothing maw, lined with dripping canines and incisors like knives.
I hurled myself back, into a large stack of boxes, sending them crashing back next to the freezer. The beast was the size of a puma, with flaming, glowing ember eyes that pierced my soul and hypnotized me into panic. I jumped up as it stood on its hideous, black hind legs and did something I’ve never heard a rodent do, before or since.
The “mouse” roared at me.
I shrieked like Miss Muffet and jumped for my life when the leviathan charged me, all fangs and matted, chocolate-colored fur, the rabid foam spraying from its mouth as it darted straight for me. I jumped straight up onto a box, which promptly collapsed under my weight with a clattering crash and a tinkling of crushed glass items. My mother screamed again, and not the typical wail of a frightened person startled by a tiny terror, but the bone-tingling, murder-victim screech from the horror movies. My brother twisted around my mother’s legs crying like a pansy, and I freaked again when the mouse came back out from beneath a piece of legged furniture and zipped across the room into the closet. I stomped blindly, madly, frantically after it, elbows and knees flying up like a clown at a hoe-down, trying with all my might to overcome my “fight-or-flight” response that squeezed exclamations of fear from my clenched teeth. Small boxes, paper piles, a terra cotta pot, and the floor were all I hit before the mouse turned again to charge me. I screamed again, hearing the sound somewhere off in the distance, and finally could fight my instincts no longer as I whipped around quick as a wink and outran that mouse to the kitchen. I leapt onto the counter on the far side, pulling my legs up behind me and grabbing my knees to my chest, my saucer-sized eyes staring through my soda-bottle glasses, waiting to see the monster crashing after me.
My mother and brother were huddled at the door of the room, looking at me. I was panting and puffing, a final heebie-jeebie twisting its way up my spine, standing my hair on end momentarily.
“Did … did you -- get it?” my mother asked.
-JDT-
That morning wasn’t anything unusual. It was a crisp, overcast autumn day. I don’t even remember what month it was, to tell the truth. I remember the coolness outside, and the way the day started so chilly. My grandmother called the weather “brisk,” and my mother never stopped imitating it. You should hear someone who’s drunk mock another person’s southern drawl; it’s a comedy classic. Anyway, there wasn’t anything unusual about that day to speak of, as best I can recall.
It must have been either Saturday or Sunday. Maybe it was after school. I don’t recall anymore. What I do remember, though, is the cold of the linoleum floor biting right through my socks and chilling my feet. I completely dressed everyday in those years, for a couple of reasons. One, I never knew what the day would hold. Sometimes the order of the day was “exploring” -- that was my lush mother’s term for getting in the car and getting as lost as possible. Other times, the day was spent watching her get progressively more drunk, belligerent and stupid while the Michelob bottles piled up around the house. On those days, I tried to be outside or somewhere else -- ANYwhere else -- as much of the day as I could. But, during the cold months, my mother spent her days shivering in front of an electric coil heating element that ticked and clicked, glowing red hot from it’s tiny alcove in the lower part of the wall. It didn’t heat much, so she’d stand right in front of it with a sweater or light jacket on, her knees and hands clenched together while she chattered her teeth and bitched about the cold.
On that day, I was doing something with my brother in our room. We were playing with our dolls -- sorry, I mean “action figures” -- or something like that. It was too cold to play outside and not cold enough to snow, so we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We holed up in our room and tried not to pay attention to what was going on in the other areas of the house. My old man wasn’t there, and it was just me, Ryan and my mother.
So when she screamed her blood-curdling scream of terror, we both bolted without thought into the living room to see what was wrong.
She wasn’t there. We passed into the main room of the house, which was the kitchen. There was a tiny gas stove that seemed to date to the Civil War against the wall adjacent to the entrance from the living room, and a diminutive refrigerator beside it on the connecting wall that separated the kitchen from the “spare bedroom“. The old farm-style sink, buried in a bank of rotting and leaning cabinets that seemed to beg for a swift merciful death were opposite the spare bedroom. Against these, pinned like a knife was being held to her face, was my wide-eyed and horrified mother.
“What’s going on?” I said, following her terror-frozen stare into the spare bedroom.
“S-something -- h-HUGE -- ran across -- in that room --” she stammered.
“What was it, Mommy?” Ryan yelled. He got excited easily and had a big mouth.
“A - m-m-m-MOUSE!” she spat, and buried her head in her hands as a case of the willies shook her like a dusty blanket.
“A mouse?” I repeated, suddenly trying to become the “man of the house.” With my dad away, of course, it was my job to address these things. Spiders in the corner, mice in the kitchen, burglars threatening to enter -- these things became my responsibility when my father wasn’t at home. At least, it was in my mind.
I marshaled my entire five-foot-one frame and began to march toward the “spare bedroom.” I never knew how the hell it qualified as being “spare” when my stinking, loud-mouthed, slob of a brother and I had to share a room, but I didn’t make the rules. I strutted into the room, which had always been filled with our “leftover” furniture, boxes that never got unpacked, a big Kenmore freezer filled with frozen meat, and miscellaneous crap that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else in the house. We’d definitely down-graded from the house we had in California, and the “spare room” was actually a storage locker, in retrospect.
Somewhere, among all the crumpled newspaper pages, stacks of battered corrugated cardboard, rippled and stained linoleum, and the one ancient, paint-crusted window, a mouse was hiding.
I waltzed in like a young gunslinger going to meet the local hero in a bad western. I had the freezer along one wall to my right, the window in front of me and the “closet” -- a gap between two interior walls that was divided in half to form a storage space for this room and our room just beyond it -- to my left, along with most of the room. I swaggered in, feeling very grown-up and John Wayne-ish, swatting boxes and rattling stacks of debris to shoo the mouse out of hiding.
“Be careful!” my mother called, another bout of the willies shivering the words out of her.
“It’s only a mouse, mom,” I said, rolling my eyes. How much of a problem can this be?
I’d dealt with mice before. Tiny, with little pink limbs and those bouncing, stiff little tails, they usually were found at the wrong end of a hardware store trap of wood and copper. But, I reasoned, they’re so small a good stomp should do the trick. The brownish little vermin were generally no longer than your index finger and could be driven to a heart attack if you sent them up in a tin can on a kite string. I’d done it with some friends when I was a kid. We caught a field mouse out near the Contra Costa Canal back home, just outside the Dutch Pride Dairy on Railroad Avenue. He didn’t fight much, and we tied a tin can to Barry Watters’ kite up near where the string anchored to the plastic, delta-winged kite. We sent the kite up for a bit; it went wonky a couple of times, but nothing ever fell out of the can. When we drew it back in that mouse was dead, blood oozing from his teeny pink nose. So, this would be no big deal.
I heard the critter scratching around some boxes back in the corner of the room, and my mother wailed and recoiled into the kitchen again. My brother kept pushing his round, fat nose into the room and screaming “Was that it?? Where is it?? I wanna see it!” I kept shouting at him to give me some room and not to let it get out. There was a flash of brown as the mouse skittered out of my peripheral vision, and I whizzed around on my Chukka-boot sole to stomp on it.
What I saw wasn’t a tiny mouse with delicate pink limbs and a bouncing little tail.
I hit the brakes when I saw it, and felt like the slick linoleum might as well have been ball bearings and marbles. I couldn’t seem to stop as I hurtled headlong into the beast’s open, frothing maw, lined with dripping canines and incisors like knives.
I hurled myself back, into a large stack of boxes, sending them crashing back next to the freezer. The beast was the size of a puma, with flaming, glowing ember eyes that pierced my soul and hypnotized me into panic. I jumped up as it stood on its hideous, black hind legs and did something I’ve never heard a rodent do, before or since.
The “mouse” roared at me.
I shrieked like Miss Muffet and jumped for my life when the leviathan charged me, all fangs and matted, chocolate-colored fur, the rabid foam spraying from its mouth as it darted straight for me. I jumped straight up onto a box, which promptly collapsed under my weight with a clattering crash and a tinkling of crushed glass items. My mother screamed again, and not the typical wail of a frightened person startled by a tiny terror, but the bone-tingling, murder-victim screech from the horror movies. My brother twisted around my mother’s legs crying like a pansy, and I freaked again when the mouse came back out from beneath a piece of legged furniture and zipped across the room into the closet. I stomped blindly, madly, frantically after it, elbows and knees flying up like a clown at a hoe-down, trying with all my might to overcome my “fight-or-flight” response that squeezed exclamations of fear from my clenched teeth. Small boxes, paper piles, a terra cotta pot, and the floor were all I hit before the mouse turned again to charge me. I screamed again, hearing the sound somewhere off in the distance, and finally could fight my instincts no longer as I whipped around quick as a wink and outran that mouse to the kitchen. I leapt onto the counter on the far side, pulling my legs up behind me and grabbing my knees to my chest, my saucer-sized eyes staring through my soda-bottle glasses, waiting to see the monster crashing after me.
My mother and brother were huddled at the door of the room, looking at me. I was panting and puffing, a final heebie-jeebie twisting its way up my spine, standing my hair on end momentarily.
“Did … did you -- get it?” my mother asked.
-JDT-
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Chubs and the Watermelon
How was I supposed to resist it?
That summer was HOT; one of the hottest I'd ever been through. The temperatures weren't as high on the mercury scale as I'd seen in my time in the San Fernando Valley outskirts, but the humidity there is far, far lower. Here, in the deep south, east of the Mississippi River and south of the Mason Dixon line, the air was what my parents always called "muggy." I wasn't sure why it was "muggy," or even what "muggy" meant, but I got the idea that it made the hot feel hotter. The days in Georgia could be stifling.
As a kid, you don't mind as much. My brother and I were used to playing outside in the heat, and we were getting used to the idea of no air conditioning in the house to help ease it, too. My father thought he was clever and he placed two box fans in two windows in the house: one in my parents' room blowing air in from the outside, making their room wetter and cooler with passing air. The other fan was in our room, and was pointed blowing OUT, to "create airflow." That's what my spineless, selfish old man told us; ours had to point out so that "airflow" could move through the tiny house. And of course, that ain't what happened. The hot air gathered in the middle of the house and sat there like a fat, hot cloud of humidity and warmth, so that my brother and I could barely breathe. Every night I turned that damned fan around so that it was blowing inward from our window, and every morning the old man would curse and swear about it and turn it back around on his way out to work. His dumb-ass plan didn't work and he wouldn't listen to the complaints my brother and I gave. It's not easy to sleep when you're roasting in your own juices, and when I suggested he turn the fan in HIS room to blow out, well, that was the end of the discussion.
So, we jumped at any opportunity to go someplace air conditioned. This time, it was Aunt Eudie's house.
I didn't even know I had an Aunt Eudie until that day. My grandmother -- my father's mom -- came up the driveway that morning and asked if we wanted to go with her to visit Aunt Eudie, her sister. Apparently, Aunt Eudie was keen on seeing us again. I wracked my brain to remember when she'd ever seen me the first time, but couldn't find it in the recesses of my memory. I shrugged and asked if she had an air conditioner in her house. When my grandmother said she did, I was all in. My brother too, so while grandma went back home we bolted to secure the necessary permission from my mother -- who wasn't drunk yet that day. Then we were off, racing down the driveway to grandma's house on the bottom half of the lot to join her in her forest green Aspen. We didn't know where Aunt Eudie lived, but we knew grandma had an air conditioned car, so the day would be spent in sweet coolness.
My brother and I came racing to her front door. It was partially hidden beneath the wooden staircase that clambered up to the second floor. My grandfather built that house sometime in the distant and unclear haze of the past. He died before I was born, and I didn't know how much farther back the house dated than that, but it was newer than the one we lived in. Our tiny green asbestos-clad shack was where they lived while he built the newer, larger white house where grandma lived, I surmised. When grandma stepped through the screen door, a bulbous, jiggling figure followed her: our cousin, Chubs. He was going with us.
His face brightened when he saw us. I think he'd been staring down the barrel of spending all day with two old women alone, with no one for company but them. When he saw us, he knew, just as we did, it was going to be a lot more fun. Chubs, Ryan and I always seemed to have a good time. He was a couple of years younger than me and a couple of years older than my brother, so he sort of became the middle brother we never had. He could relate to both of us, so he always made for good company. As a bonus, his whiney sister Missy was nowhere to be found.
After the initial greetings, and finding out he'd been dropped off by his mother while she and Missy went out shopping, we all piled into grandma's car for the trip. I assumed it would be some distance, since grandma was taking her car. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Aunt Eudie lived less than a block away at the top of the cross street that terminated Bell Avenue to the south. I laughed aloud when we pulled up to the crisp, white double-wide on the narrow strip of grass just beside the bend in the road. It wouldn't have taken 10 minutes to walk the distance; the air conditioner in grandma's car didn't even get cold before we got there.
The house was cool inside, though. It smelled of old person, but what are you gonna do? She's old. As kids, we didn't pay much attention to the decor, but I remember yellowish, pale shag carpet and wood-paneling on the walls. I remember the popcorn ceilings and the pale yellow and white patterned sofa, still covered in plastic. I remember the faux-wood octagon dining table and the wrought-iron and vinyl chairs tucked tightly against the apron. I remember the green glass half-dome over the white ball hanging down over that table, and the ticking of a clock that I could never find.
And the smell of watermelon wafting to us from the "formal dining room" -- a niche cut into the family room wall, lined with mirrors, hung with a black wrought-iron chandelier made to look like it was holding candles, and a table covered with a lemon-yellow tablecloth. It was stacked with stout, striped watermelons.
But the first thing I noticed was Aunt Eudie.
She must have been six feet four, all pasty skin and beehive hairdo, with mushy, doughy hands that were soft and dry and creepy. She shook my hand, and it reminded me of a soft man's hand with long, manicured nails. A shiver ran up my spine, but I struggled to control it. I tried to meet her eyes, but couldn't. My brother was unusually quiet, and I knew he was feeling the same, eerie sensation: Aunt Eudie could have been a man for all we knew.
We did the dutiful nice things that kids do, answering her queries and laughing politely at her (not funny) jokes and one-liners, and then she asked us if we wanted to go outside and see her flowers. Hell no, we didn't want to go outside and see her flowers. We wanted to sit inside and feel that cool air cascade over us from the air conditioner. I politely said that my allergies were acting up a bit, and if it didn't offend her, I'd prefer to stay inside away from the flowers. She smiled and said that was fine, and would the other boys like to stay and keep me company?
They did, of course.
So, she towered over her sister and headed for the sliding glass door somewhere behind the kitchen, which I was sure was brown and orange or olive green and mustard yellow. When we heard it close behind them, Chubs was the first to utter it: the watermelon sure looked good.
We agreed. I walked over to one, and thumped it lightly with my finger, flicking it like the back of a weaker kid's head. It sounded wet and solid, and thumped grandly.
I got to staring at that melon, and noticing it's shape. It was oblong, and not too big, kind of like an oversized ...
... Chubs spoke my words before I could: "Hey, that looks just like a big football!"
I nodded and smiled, and he picked it up. "Ugh, it's heavy!" he complained, then hefted it to his shoulder. "He's back to pass --" he announced, trying to pose like a quarterback about to make a deep throw.
"He looks long downfield --" I added, our imaginations transforming the tiny little trailer into a packed stadium of screaming fans. My brother opened his mouth and made the standard "roar of the crowd" noise while I moved farther away from Chubs.
How were we supposed to resist? It DID look like a football.
"He's got a man open --" I continued, raising my hand like a receiver signaling for the throw.
Chubs stepped forward, putting his shoulder beneath his elbow and pushing with a mighty grunt as he hefted the bulk of that watermelon toward me like a shot-putter. I watched it wobble and arc slowly toward me, and shuffled under it, letting the weight collapse me as I caught it. It WAS heavy; it was like catching a small child. I grunted loudly, trying to figure out how the heck a melon so small could weigh so much.
"I'm open!" my brother said, waving to me. I wrinkled my brow, shaking my head.
"I don't think so, Ryan," I said. "I can barely catch it, it's so heavy. I don't want you to drop it." And then I turned and chucked it at Chubs before the whining and complaining about being a big kid, strong enough, yadda yadda, could start.
Chubs WAS a big kid. Only a couple of inches shorter than me, but much stockier. He was a pudgy but solid Weeble, and I was sure he'd wobble but not fall down. The melon arced right into his arms at about chest-level, and I heard it slap soundly against his skin.
And I watched it slowly, painfully, slip right through his arms.
I froze, my spine stiffening like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming semi, while Chubs began to giggle his hyena's laugh. He slapped one hand over the melon, his palm desperately trying to grip the smooth green rind, and as the melon inexorably pushed its way through his attempted blockade and down his gut he swatted frantically with the other hand.
No use! The melon kept sliding down his hips. Slap! Ssssslide. Slap! Ssssslide.
The insane, lilting laughter, the hands slapping at the melon uselessly, the unstoppable descent toward the bright, yellow carpet, slowly, slowly, the rasping of denim over the smooth, slick watermelon skin and the repeated slap of Chubs' palms, trying to stop that melon.
At the knee, he couldn't reach anymore. The melon went into free fall.
How bad can it be? I thought. It's only knee high, for cryin' out loud.
In super-slow motion, like an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, the melon spilled off of Chubs' knee and went nose-down like a missile from the sky onto the chartreuse carpet, the stem side staring up at us like a watching, baleful eye streaked with alien-green stripes. The wild laughter of Ryan and Chubs, my own cries to catch it, catch it, stop it, STOP IT -- all faded. All I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat as the watermelon finally made contact with Terra Firma.
It exploded into a shower of pink debris, seeds, rind shards and juice, flying in a clothes-staining, carpet-ruining fountain that seemed so excessive for such a small melon from such a low drop. Endless pieces of internal watermelon organs sprayed up and out from ground zero and seemed to bounce from the walls, the ceiling, the mirrors, the furniture. In my mind's eye, a torrential fire hose of watermelon guts sprayed over the entire living and dining rooms, covering everything, splashing us with plant blood spatter and forensic evidence, incriminating us, accusing us, tattling on us as the bottomless gourd spouted like a humpback whale.
I heard a sound, and I was certain that it was Aunt Eudie and my grandmother coming back in from the tiny flower garden -- where there was far too little to see and it was far too hot for two elderly women -- and I jumped like a panther toward the front door, leaving Chubs and Ryan desperately clawing at watermelon chunks and goo, trying hopelessly to scoop the mess up and somehow have it passable before they came back in. It was no good, I knew; it was useless to try. I crashed through that door leaving them giggling and crying "Hey!", and heard only the beating of my own heart as I raced down the slight grade toward Bell Avenue. I rounded the corner and made a graceful arc in the middle of the street that terminated at our front door. I nearly knocked it from its hinges as I burst through and dove into my bedroom and onto my bed.
My mother came rushing in, hearing the commotion. "What's going on?" she said, glancing me over quickly to assess physical damage. "Where's Ryan?"
I panted and puffed, having made the journey in less than three minutes. "Oh ... uh, he's ... with grandma. I ... decided to ... come home early. It was ... boring."
"Oh," she said, and left the room.
But moments later -- scant moments, with my heart still pounding and breath still burning in my lungs -- the phone started to ring.
-JDT-
That summer was HOT; one of the hottest I'd ever been through. The temperatures weren't as high on the mercury scale as I'd seen in my time in the San Fernando Valley outskirts, but the humidity there is far, far lower. Here, in the deep south, east of the Mississippi River and south of the Mason Dixon line, the air was what my parents always called "muggy." I wasn't sure why it was "muggy," or even what "muggy" meant, but I got the idea that it made the hot feel hotter. The days in Georgia could be stifling.
As a kid, you don't mind as much. My brother and I were used to playing outside in the heat, and we were getting used to the idea of no air conditioning in the house to help ease it, too. My father thought he was clever and he placed two box fans in two windows in the house: one in my parents' room blowing air in from the outside, making their room wetter and cooler with passing air. The other fan was in our room, and was pointed blowing OUT, to "create airflow." That's what my spineless, selfish old man told us; ours had to point out so that "airflow" could move through the tiny house. And of course, that ain't what happened. The hot air gathered in the middle of the house and sat there like a fat, hot cloud of humidity and warmth, so that my brother and I could barely breathe. Every night I turned that damned fan around so that it was blowing inward from our window, and every morning the old man would curse and swear about it and turn it back around on his way out to work. His dumb-ass plan didn't work and he wouldn't listen to the complaints my brother and I gave. It's not easy to sleep when you're roasting in your own juices, and when I suggested he turn the fan in HIS room to blow out, well, that was the end of the discussion.
So, we jumped at any opportunity to go someplace air conditioned. This time, it was Aunt Eudie's house.
I didn't even know I had an Aunt Eudie until that day. My grandmother -- my father's mom -- came up the driveway that morning and asked if we wanted to go with her to visit Aunt Eudie, her sister. Apparently, Aunt Eudie was keen on seeing us again. I wracked my brain to remember when she'd ever seen me the first time, but couldn't find it in the recesses of my memory. I shrugged and asked if she had an air conditioner in her house. When my grandmother said she did, I was all in. My brother too, so while grandma went back home we bolted to secure the necessary permission from my mother -- who wasn't drunk yet that day. Then we were off, racing down the driveway to grandma's house on the bottom half of the lot to join her in her forest green Aspen. We didn't know where Aunt Eudie lived, but we knew grandma had an air conditioned car, so the day would be spent in sweet coolness.
My brother and I came racing to her front door. It was partially hidden beneath the wooden staircase that clambered up to the second floor. My grandfather built that house sometime in the distant and unclear haze of the past. He died before I was born, and I didn't know how much farther back the house dated than that, but it was newer than the one we lived in. Our tiny green asbestos-clad shack was where they lived while he built the newer, larger white house where grandma lived, I surmised. When grandma stepped through the screen door, a bulbous, jiggling figure followed her: our cousin, Chubs. He was going with us.
His face brightened when he saw us. I think he'd been staring down the barrel of spending all day with two old women alone, with no one for company but them. When he saw us, he knew, just as we did, it was going to be a lot more fun. Chubs, Ryan and I always seemed to have a good time. He was a couple of years younger than me and a couple of years older than my brother, so he sort of became the middle brother we never had. He could relate to both of us, so he always made for good company. As a bonus, his whiney sister Missy was nowhere to be found.
After the initial greetings, and finding out he'd been dropped off by his mother while she and Missy went out shopping, we all piled into grandma's car for the trip. I assumed it would be some distance, since grandma was taking her car. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Aunt Eudie lived less than a block away at the top of the cross street that terminated Bell Avenue to the south. I laughed aloud when we pulled up to the crisp, white double-wide on the narrow strip of grass just beside the bend in the road. It wouldn't have taken 10 minutes to walk the distance; the air conditioner in grandma's car didn't even get cold before we got there.
The house was cool inside, though. It smelled of old person, but what are you gonna do? She's old. As kids, we didn't pay much attention to the decor, but I remember yellowish, pale shag carpet and wood-paneling on the walls. I remember the popcorn ceilings and the pale yellow and white patterned sofa, still covered in plastic. I remember the faux-wood octagon dining table and the wrought-iron and vinyl chairs tucked tightly against the apron. I remember the green glass half-dome over the white ball hanging down over that table, and the ticking of a clock that I could never find.
And the smell of watermelon wafting to us from the "formal dining room" -- a niche cut into the family room wall, lined with mirrors, hung with a black wrought-iron chandelier made to look like it was holding candles, and a table covered with a lemon-yellow tablecloth. It was stacked with stout, striped watermelons.
But the first thing I noticed was Aunt Eudie.
She must have been six feet four, all pasty skin and beehive hairdo, with mushy, doughy hands that were soft and dry and creepy. She shook my hand, and it reminded me of a soft man's hand with long, manicured nails. A shiver ran up my spine, but I struggled to control it. I tried to meet her eyes, but couldn't. My brother was unusually quiet, and I knew he was feeling the same, eerie sensation: Aunt Eudie could have been a man for all we knew.
We did the dutiful nice things that kids do, answering her queries and laughing politely at her (not funny) jokes and one-liners, and then she asked us if we wanted to go outside and see her flowers. Hell no, we didn't want to go outside and see her flowers. We wanted to sit inside and feel that cool air cascade over us from the air conditioner. I politely said that my allergies were acting up a bit, and if it didn't offend her, I'd prefer to stay inside away from the flowers. She smiled and said that was fine, and would the other boys like to stay and keep me company?
They did, of course.
So, she towered over her sister and headed for the sliding glass door somewhere behind the kitchen, which I was sure was brown and orange or olive green and mustard yellow. When we heard it close behind them, Chubs was the first to utter it: the watermelon sure looked good.
We agreed. I walked over to one, and thumped it lightly with my finger, flicking it like the back of a weaker kid's head. It sounded wet and solid, and thumped grandly.
I got to staring at that melon, and noticing it's shape. It was oblong, and not too big, kind of like an oversized ...
... Chubs spoke my words before I could: "Hey, that looks just like a big football!"
I nodded and smiled, and he picked it up. "Ugh, it's heavy!" he complained, then hefted it to his shoulder. "He's back to pass --" he announced, trying to pose like a quarterback about to make a deep throw.
"He looks long downfield --" I added, our imaginations transforming the tiny little trailer into a packed stadium of screaming fans. My brother opened his mouth and made the standard "roar of the crowd" noise while I moved farther away from Chubs.
How were we supposed to resist? It DID look like a football.
"He's got a man open --" I continued, raising my hand like a receiver signaling for the throw.
Chubs stepped forward, putting his shoulder beneath his elbow and pushing with a mighty grunt as he hefted the bulk of that watermelon toward me like a shot-putter. I watched it wobble and arc slowly toward me, and shuffled under it, letting the weight collapse me as I caught it. It WAS heavy; it was like catching a small child. I grunted loudly, trying to figure out how the heck a melon so small could weigh so much.
"I'm open!" my brother said, waving to me. I wrinkled my brow, shaking my head.
"I don't think so, Ryan," I said. "I can barely catch it, it's so heavy. I don't want you to drop it." And then I turned and chucked it at Chubs before the whining and complaining about being a big kid, strong enough, yadda yadda, could start.
Chubs WAS a big kid. Only a couple of inches shorter than me, but much stockier. He was a pudgy but solid Weeble, and I was sure he'd wobble but not fall down. The melon arced right into his arms at about chest-level, and I heard it slap soundly against his skin.
And I watched it slowly, painfully, slip right through his arms.
I froze, my spine stiffening like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming semi, while Chubs began to giggle his hyena's laugh. He slapped one hand over the melon, his palm desperately trying to grip the smooth green rind, and as the melon inexorably pushed its way through his attempted blockade and down his gut he swatted frantically with the other hand.
No use! The melon kept sliding down his hips. Slap! Ssssslide. Slap! Ssssslide.
The insane, lilting laughter, the hands slapping at the melon uselessly, the unstoppable descent toward the bright, yellow carpet, slowly, slowly, the rasping of denim over the smooth, slick watermelon skin and the repeated slap of Chubs' palms, trying to stop that melon.
At the knee, he couldn't reach anymore. The melon went into free fall.
How bad can it be? I thought. It's only knee high, for cryin' out loud.
In super-slow motion, like an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, the melon spilled off of Chubs' knee and went nose-down like a missile from the sky onto the chartreuse carpet, the stem side staring up at us like a watching, baleful eye streaked with alien-green stripes. The wild laughter of Ryan and Chubs, my own cries to catch it, catch it, stop it, STOP IT -- all faded. All I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat as the watermelon finally made contact with Terra Firma.
It exploded into a shower of pink debris, seeds, rind shards and juice, flying in a clothes-staining, carpet-ruining fountain that seemed so excessive for such a small melon from such a low drop. Endless pieces of internal watermelon organs sprayed up and out from ground zero and seemed to bounce from the walls, the ceiling, the mirrors, the furniture. In my mind's eye, a torrential fire hose of watermelon guts sprayed over the entire living and dining rooms, covering everything, splashing us with plant blood spatter and forensic evidence, incriminating us, accusing us, tattling on us as the bottomless gourd spouted like a humpback whale.
I heard a sound, and I was certain that it was Aunt Eudie and my grandmother coming back in from the tiny flower garden -- where there was far too little to see and it was far too hot for two elderly women -- and I jumped like a panther toward the front door, leaving Chubs and Ryan desperately clawing at watermelon chunks and goo, trying hopelessly to scoop the mess up and somehow have it passable before they came back in. It was no good, I knew; it was useless to try. I crashed through that door leaving them giggling and crying "Hey!", and heard only the beating of my own heart as I raced down the slight grade toward Bell Avenue. I rounded the corner and made a graceful arc in the middle of the street that terminated at our front door. I nearly knocked it from its hinges as I burst through and dove into my bedroom and onto my bed.
My mother came rushing in, hearing the commotion. "What's going on?" she said, glancing me over quickly to assess physical damage. "Where's Ryan?"
I panted and puffed, having made the journey in less than three minutes. "Oh ... uh, he's ... with grandma. I ... decided to ... come home early. It was ... boring."
"Oh," she said, and left the room.
But moments later -- scant moments, with my heart still pounding and breath still burning in my lungs -- the phone started to ring.
-JDT-
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Neighbors and Strangers
We hated the dog across the street, almost from the moment we moved in.
He was a mutt, about the size and color of an Irish Setter, but his hair was shorter and more coarse. He was a sneaky, mangy flea-bag that would charge at bike riders and pedestrians as they worked their way up the hill on Bell Avenue, but he'd hide and wait in the thick grass or under the porch behind the rotting lattice beside the leaning, creaking stairs of the old white farmhouse across the street until it was too late. People would jump and cry out, and had to wait for one of the snotty-nosed, milk-mustached kids to come out and wrangle the dog in; or for the fat, waddling old man to groan and limp his way out of the house, adjusting his ball cap eight or ten times and sweeping back hair that wasn't there anymore, shifting his weight from one hip to the other for his locomotion. We didn't know the dog's name, or the kids' names for that matter, but we saw them laughing and half-heartedly apologizing to the people the dog scared as they led him away by the collar. We didn't know them, but my father seemed to. He just never bothered to fill us in. My brother and I called that hated dog "Bruno." To this day, I can't remember why.
Being a stranger to your neighbors is something that our neighbors weren't used to. The kids across the street were dirt-smudged, bare-footed and bare-chested urchins with drink-stained upper lips and matted hair. Their eyes gleamed with impish evil and their words were strange to us, impossible to comprehend and decipher. It was like living in another country.
In the winter, the snow came. A thin, white layer covered the ground one morning when we got up, and we were amazed. The cold -- the coldest temperatures we'd ever experienced up to that point in our lives -- stayed around to help keep the snow on the ground. But the temperatures were near the freezing point during the day and in the mid-twenties at night, so the snow would partially thaw then freeze again, forming what I called snow-cone slush.
I was in the yard that Saturday, bundled up like an Eskimo. From across the street, the boy closest to our age beaned me clean on the cheek with a snowball whipped across Bell Avenue at me. When I looked, he was grinning and his imp eyes glinted, challenging me, daring me to whip one back at him. He was smaller than me, though not much (I wasn't a big kid for my age, and had been sickly growing up, so I never "filled out" completely), and he stood frozen in his follow-through stance after he threw the snow-cone mixture of ice and powder at me.
The yards seemed to crawl up to the blacktop of Bell Avenue as though in worship, their mighty, ancient trees majestically spreading over the lawns and drainage ditches and driveways like queens spreading their arms and robes over their fawning subjects. Seeds and leaves cascaded over dense lawns, used to thriving for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of years with minimal sunlight and moisture -- only what spilled through the canopy of the massive trees. I stood in my yard, which rolled away from the street to my front porch, and could not see the boy's knees. He was standing on the opposite side of the street and the rise of the road between us hid the ground from view.
I chose to ignore him and went back to whatever it was I was doing in the snow. He pulled the hood of his tattered, worn blue jacket off his head and tore the gloves from his sticky, lint-covered fingers and bent down over his feet. I couldn't see anything but the hump of his back rising over the road as he fussed over something for a few moments, then stood up with another slushy snowball in his hand. I tried to hide my irritation behind my thick glasses and long hair, but set my jaw as I willed him not to throw it, don't throw it, don't you dare throw it you little ...
He threw it.
This time, I was looking. I saw the shining white blob of frozen moisture arc over the street and took a single step back, watching it land in an explosion of sharp, needle-like shards of broken ice and glass-like frozen chunks. Georgia isn't a snowy place in general being in the deep south. What does fall is usually wet and heavy, and there isn't a lot of it. It was unusual that they got nearly 5 inches that winter, and my brother and I, who had seen snow perhaps two or three times in our lives, were ecstatic about it. We played in it, tried to build a snow man in it, took the keel off my mother's water ski and slid about in it. But we didn't throw snowballs. We'd never known how to make one.
I looked down on that splash of broken glass and mush and heard that dirty devil-boy cackle. I thought of that dog, chasing us and others up the street then hiding, the way they laughed at the people the dog harassed, and I thought about their dirty faces and clothes and feet, and the evil, impish glint in their eyes.
I knew, because our yard was steeper and lower than theirs, when I bent down he couldn't see me at all. I took my time, fishing beneath the pressed, compacted inches of snow remaining in our yard, feeling in the wet, brown and dormant grass beneath. When I found what I wanted, I placed it gently in my palm and packed the snow around it carefully, making sure none of it showed. I made the ball snow-cone sized, just like he did, and when I stood up, there was no way to tell there was a rock in the middle of that slush ball.
He grinned at me and squared his feet to the blacktop, his crooked smile broadening on his dirty lips. I smiled wryly back, and then I threw the snowball, not knowing if I'd even built it so it would hold together in flight.
I was older than he was, and I could put a LOT more speed on the throw than him. Mine didn't arc lazily over the street and plop into his hood or onto his shoulder. Nope -- mine whizzed across the street like a fast ball, on a line and dead on target. I wasn't a great athlete, but I was better than I thought, and I was just starting to get the hormones going that would rage throughout my teen years. All of them were in that wet, hard, icy throw with a heart of stone.
It hit him square in the forehead before he could move out of the way. He probably only caught a glimpse of the projectile before it cracked loudly off the crown of his head. I was actually aiming for his face, dead-center in the nose was my goal, but I was happy with the hit. There was a sickening knock like someone rapping bare knuckles on a solid-core wooden door, and the weight of the snowball knocked him head over heels. I saw the holes in the bottom of his hand-me-down galoshes while he went head first backwards into the snow, but lost sight of him completely under the rise of the road.
I was already making my way back into the house when I heard the wail rise into the sharp, chilly air like a siren. I stepped up the pace and vanished with a bit of an adrenaline rush pushing up my spine, making sure I didn't hear the bang of the farmhouse door opening before MY door was closed ... and locked.
I stayed away from the windows and indoors the rest of the day, and only realized when my mother brought it to my attention that I was whistling a happy tune.
-JDT-
He was a mutt, about the size and color of an Irish Setter, but his hair was shorter and more coarse. He was a sneaky, mangy flea-bag that would charge at bike riders and pedestrians as they worked their way up the hill on Bell Avenue, but he'd hide and wait in the thick grass or under the porch behind the rotting lattice beside the leaning, creaking stairs of the old white farmhouse across the street until it was too late. People would jump and cry out, and had to wait for one of the snotty-nosed, milk-mustached kids to come out and wrangle the dog in; or for the fat, waddling old man to groan and limp his way out of the house, adjusting his ball cap eight or ten times and sweeping back hair that wasn't there anymore, shifting his weight from one hip to the other for his locomotion. We didn't know the dog's name, or the kids' names for that matter, but we saw them laughing and half-heartedly apologizing to the people the dog scared as they led him away by the collar. We didn't know them, but my father seemed to. He just never bothered to fill us in. My brother and I called that hated dog "Bruno." To this day, I can't remember why.
Being a stranger to your neighbors is something that our neighbors weren't used to. The kids across the street were dirt-smudged, bare-footed and bare-chested urchins with drink-stained upper lips and matted hair. Their eyes gleamed with impish evil and their words were strange to us, impossible to comprehend and decipher. It was like living in another country.
In the winter, the snow came. A thin, white layer covered the ground one morning when we got up, and we were amazed. The cold -- the coldest temperatures we'd ever experienced up to that point in our lives -- stayed around to help keep the snow on the ground. But the temperatures were near the freezing point during the day and in the mid-twenties at night, so the snow would partially thaw then freeze again, forming what I called snow-cone slush.
I was in the yard that Saturday, bundled up like an Eskimo. From across the street, the boy closest to our age beaned me clean on the cheek with a snowball whipped across Bell Avenue at me. When I looked, he was grinning and his imp eyes glinted, challenging me, daring me to whip one back at him. He was smaller than me, though not much (I wasn't a big kid for my age, and had been sickly growing up, so I never "filled out" completely), and he stood frozen in his follow-through stance after he threw the snow-cone mixture of ice and powder at me.
The yards seemed to crawl up to the blacktop of Bell Avenue as though in worship, their mighty, ancient trees majestically spreading over the lawns and drainage ditches and driveways like queens spreading their arms and robes over their fawning subjects. Seeds and leaves cascaded over dense lawns, used to thriving for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of years with minimal sunlight and moisture -- only what spilled through the canopy of the massive trees. I stood in my yard, which rolled away from the street to my front porch, and could not see the boy's knees. He was standing on the opposite side of the street and the rise of the road between us hid the ground from view.
I chose to ignore him and went back to whatever it was I was doing in the snow. He pulled the hood of his tattered, worn blue jacket off his head and tore the gloves from his sticky, lint-covered fingers and bent down over his feet. I couldn't see anything but the hump of his back rising over the road as he fussed over something for a few moments, then stood up with another slushy snowball in his hand. I tried to hide my irritation behind my thick glasses and long hair, but set my jaw as I willed him not to throw it, don't throw it, don't you dare throw it you little ...
He threw it.
This time, I was looking. I saw the shining white blob of frozen moisture arc over the street and took a single step back, watching it land in an explosion of sharp, needle-like shards of broken ice and glass-like frozen chunks. Georgia isn't a snowy place in general being in the deep south. What does fall is usually wet and heavy, and there isn't a lot of it. It was unusual that they got nearly 5 inches that winter, and my brother and I, who had seen snow perhaps two or three times in our lives, were ecstatic about it. We played in it, tried to build a snow man in it, took the keel off my mother's water ski and slid about in it. But we didn't throw snowballs. We'd never known how to make one.
I looked down on that splash of broken glass and mush and heard that dirty devil-boy cackle. I thought of that dog, chasing us and others up the street then hiding, the way they laughed at the people the dog harassed, and I thought about their dirty faces and clothes and feet, and the evil, impish glint in their eyes.
I knew, because our yard was steeper and lower than theirs, when I bent down he couldn't see me at all. I took my time, fishing beneath the pressed, compacted inches of snow remaining in our yard, feeling in the wet, brown and dormant grass beneath. When I found what I wanted, I placed it gently in my palm and packed the snow around it carefully, making sure none of it showed. I made the ball snow-cone sized, just like he did, and when I stood up, there was no way to tell there was a rock in the middle of that slush ball.
He grinned at me and squared his feet to the blacktop, his crooked smile broadening on his dirty lips. I smiled wryly back, and then I threw the snowball, not knowing if I'd even built it so it would hold together in flight.
I was older than he was, and I could put a LOT more speed on the throw than him. Mine didn't arc lazily over the street and plop into his hood or onto his shoulder. Nope -- mine whizzed across the street like a fast ball, on a line and dead on target. I wasn't a great athlete, but I was better than I thought, and I was just starting to get the hormones going that would rage throughout my teen years. All of them were in that wet, hard, icy throw with a heart of stone.
It hit him square in the forehead before he could move out of the way. He probably only caught a glimpse of the projectile before it cracked loudly off the crown of his head. I was actually aiming for his face, dead-center in the nose was my goal, but I was happy with the hit. There was a sickening knock like someone rapping bare knuckles on a solid-core wooden door, and the weight of the snowball knocked him head over heels. I saw the holes in the bottom of his hand-me-down galoshes while he went head first backwards into the snow, but lost sight of him completely under the rise of the road.
I was already making my way back into the house when I heard the wail rise into the sharp, chilly air like a siren. I stepped up the pace and vanished with a bit of an adrenaline rush pushing up my spine, making sure I didn't hear the bang of the farmhouse door opening before MY door was closed ... and locked.
I stayed away from the windows and indoors the rest of the day, and only realized when my mother brought it to my attention that I was whistling a happy tune.
-JDT-
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Tall Grass and Monsters
It was all just a trick on Missy.
She was standing there in her little girl, 70s-striped multi-colored sundress, fingering her lower lip as the wood burned between her ears. The three of us were hunkered down in the tall grass, ignoring the thick humidity and the dew-dampened stalks near the ground at the base of the tall, dense grass. The sky was never really blue in Georgia; it was usually a cadet blue or grayish hue from the water vapor hanging around in the summer. It would probably be too hot and stifling for me to do anything now, but then, at 12 years old, I was lying in the grass watching Missy wonder where we were.
The idea was Chubs'. He was sick of his little sister; she was a pest, and he didn’t want her around anymore. I could relate; my little brother Ryan was a pain too, and I half considered doing the same thing to him more than once over the summer. Problem was, most times he was all I had for company. Being outcasts and newcomers anywhere didn’t make for easy friends and welcome company; doing it in a small, tight-knit community of private school kids that all knew each other from years ago made it even harder. Add in that we were from California, land of fruits and nuts, and it made us even weirder. So we weren’t exactly beating them off with sticks. Ryan was better than being alone. Most of the time.
So when Chubs wanted to ditch Missy, I figured I could empathize. But Ryan and Chubs were kind of buddies too, so Ryan was there when I spouted off that I thought we could do it.
Chubs’ real name was Ryan too. He was portly and jolly, with a quick laugh and a slow brain and was a cousin of ours. His drunk of a father and my drunk of a mother used to hang around and drink sometimes while my dad just laughed along with them and dealt with her belligerence later, when everyone else left. He was always a pussy like that; no matter how bad my mom got, no matter how abusive – with him OR with us – he just found a way to excuse it and wimp out. He never could stand up to her. So the “adults” were in the house sucking down beer, and the heat of the afternoon was ours to play in, out in the large yards butting against the black-top of Ross Avenue. The lot was deep, and the patch of grass between our backyard and the neighbors’ was no-man’s-land. While Missy went to the bathroom we scrabbled over the wire and stick shoulder-high fence and shuffled down in the high grass behind the lot, just beyond the compost pile and the huge apple tree between the two houses that shared our lot.
The three of us slithered onto our bellies, with Ryan and Chubs on either side of me. The fact that they were both named Ryan made using Chubs’ nickname more convenient. That was how we found out what it was. That, and the fact that his old man called him that more than anyone. We were staring through the seed-topped grass watching Missy swivel her head back and forth in the heat looking for us. The confusion on her face was enough to set us all giggling and shushing each other while trying not to give away our hiding spot.
Every time Missy took a step in the right direction, we’d shut up fast, holding our breath to try and quell the laughs. Ryan wasn’t exactly a quiet kid, either; he had one of the loudest mouths I’ve ever heard, and was keen to use it whenever he could. It wasn’t easy to get him to be still, but knowing something was being pulled over on someone besides him helped. We just lied still in the grass and she’d move off in another direction, calling out asking where “y’all” went, and then standing still and listening for the answer that didn’t come.
I saw movement out of the corner of my soda-bottle glasses, and glanced over to my left at the bent and flattened grass around us. My breath caught in my throat when I saw it.
It was a spider.
This wasn’t any ordinary, spindly-legged, wisp of a spider. It was a Georgia spider; it was robust and threatening. You could hear them click with clattering exoskeletons when they walked, I swear. They had faces you could see because they grew to B-movie monster proportions. Georgia spiders had a long, warm, bug-infested spring and summer season to grow, and they got nice and fat preying on small birds and kids lying in the grass. It was fast as heat lightning as it scrabbled out of the dense undergrowth and moved over Chubs’ hindquarters.
I couldn’t believe he didn’t feel it – the thing was the size of a beagle and stomping its way across the ass-crack-exposing jeans of the husky kid. I threw myself backwards onto my hands and backed away as fast as I could, leaving an open space between Chubs and Ryan, both still staring and giggling at Missy.
That Volkswagen sized arachnid skittered through that tall grass and over Ryan’s outstretched legs before I could find my voice, but when I did – too late – I didn’t think through my panic about what I was saying.
I screamed “Ryan, there’s a spider on you!” at the top of my lungs.
See, the problem is, they were both named Ryan.
So, country-boy, Georgia-born Chubs hops up onto his feet, laughing his insane, contagious, easily-imitated laugh like a drunken hyena lilting and twisting, wiggling his big body in the heat and tall grass, hands working over his back and shoulders to swat the spider away. My brother Ryan, city-born and sissy-raised, screamed like a girl on a county-fair ride and jumped up onto HIS feet, HIS hands swatting wildly over his shoulders and back, squealing like a stuck pig for me to get it off, get it off, get it off!
It took me a second to process the sight of the two of them writhing and shouting, one laughing, the other near tears, both seeming to move differently but somehow as one fat, hypnotic body, undulating like ocean waves of blubber, denim and stripes.
I burst out laughing. Missy, of course, was standing there watching them dance, too, laughing with me as the two Ryans bounced and jiggled to loose themselves from the long-gone spider. I couldn’t speak to tell them it was gone. All I could do was wipe my watering eyes and hold my aching ribs as wave after wave of laughter tore through me. I couldn’t stand, but was careful to make sure that when I collapsed in peals of uncontrollable mirth, I did it away from that tall grass where clicking beagle-sized spiders lay.
To this day, I smile when I think of that story. There weren’t a lot of happy times for me in Georgia for a lot of reasons, but that was one of them. I probably laughed for half an hour before I could tell them it was gone. I promised myself before I died I’d write the story down.
Now I have. But that was just the beginning.
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